Helpful hints and friendly notes from the world-acclaimed photography instructors at BetterPhoto.com

November 08, 2011

Getting Close-up with a Wide-Angle Lens

Many photographers buy a wide-angle lens thinking its primary purpose is to take sweeping panoramas, to get the entire scene into the frame. It definitely does that, of course, and if you stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon with a 14mm lens, you will encompass most of this giant chasm.

However, I think the real power of a wide angle - as evidenced by the pictures in this article - is to distort reality. The word distortion has a pejorative connotation, so let me rephrase. I will say it this way: A wide-angle lens is most effective when it (1) exaggerates perspective, (2) makes the foreground disproportionately large compared to the background, and (3) makes the background seem much further away than it really is.

(c) Jim Zuckerman

For instance, the photo above shows my wife in a pool in Budapest, Hungary, and I was about two feet away from her. That's why she seems unusually large in comparison to the background.

Another example is the picture below of the driftwood on a beach in South Carolina near Charleston. The wood seems huge compared to the background, and this occurred simply because I placed my 14mm lens very close to the wood. In this case, the camera was about 18 inches away from it.

(c) Jim Zuckerman

Of course, our eyes never see images like this. So what? No one ever said a camera must capture what we see. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. We are dealing with a visual, artistic medium, and a wide-angle lens is a tool at our disposal to create some extremely unique images. The wider the angle, the more extreme will be the distortion.

(c) Jim Zuckerman

The closer you place the lens to the foreground, the more distortion you'll see. The large leaf in front of the waterfall I shot in Costa Rica, above, was only about two feet away from my lens.

The flowers below that I found in the Swiss Alps didn't seem this large compared to the sky when I stood there looking at them, but a 16mm focal-length lens placed about three feet away from the foreground flowers created this type of look.

(c) Jim Zuckerman

The formula, so to speak, for achieving this style is:

1. Use a wide-angle lens, and the wider the better,

2. Place the camera very close to the foreground (between 2 and 5 feet),